That’s fine, but what happens when you want to place your image (perhaps it’s a logo) on to a different coloured background?

Both backgrounds would be visible on top of each other and the image wouldn’t look professional.

… and that’s when you need a transparent image background.

How can you check whether your image has a transparent background?

You can easily check whether your image has a transparent background.

TIP: the white rectangle on your screen (before having uploaded or created an image), is your document size – it’s called the document “canvas“.

For this example, the logo has a white rectangle background (ie it’s not transparent) which, when clicked and dragged across the canvas, conceals the canvas edges (as shown below, indicated by the red arrow).

The image in this example doesn’t have a transparent background

The image needs to be separated from its coloured background so that it can be uploaded on to another background.

If you want to do this for free, Inkscape is an easy way to create a transparent image background.

Getting ready to create a transparent image background using Inkscape

1. Download Inkscape

Once downloaded, go to your desktop and double-click on the Inkscape icon.

Inkscape rarely opens the image at 100% size (see the percentage in the bottom right hand corner of the screen), so you’ll need to increase or decrease the percentage to see the true size of your image.

The large red arrow indicates the document canvas, with the percentage size circled in the bottom right hand corner

TIP: to create your own image, you can either use the “trial and error” method and experiment with all that Inkscape has to offer, or follow Inkscape’s free tutorials.

Next, create your own image or upload an existing image.

For this tutorial, we’ll upload an image.

2. Upload the image

The auto populated fields are fine when opening non .svg files

Click File (top left of screen), Open, and select the image to upload.

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